Maria Malone

Born in the North-East of England, Maria Malone worked in print journalism and television news and features. She has written TV companion books, ghosted celebrity autobiographies, and is a former Yorkshire Press Awards Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year.

Malone's new novel is Death in the Countryside.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Malone's reply:

The Winds from Further West by Alexander McCall Smith

“Sometimes you want to get away from something that’s become too much. You want to put something behind you.”

I picked this up recently, shortly after returning from a holiday in Scotland, during which a trip to the Isle of Mull was cancelled due to ferry problems. The book was the perfect read, leaving me determined one day to visit Mull. The story perfectly evokes island life and illustrates the ease with which something entirely innocent can abruptly get out of hand in today’s society.

During a lecture, Dr Neil Anderson unknowingly offends a student and finds himself the subject of a complaint. All he has to do to make the problem go away is apologise … for something he never said. Madness. He can’t, he won’t.

With one seemingly small event, a single flimsy allegation, everything is about to change.

Soon, his life in Edinburgh – ordered, settled, happy, unremarkable – is in a state of collapse. Discredited, facing an uncertain future, he resigns. On impulse, he decides he needs a break to get away from things, and escapes to the Hebridean island of Mull, off Scotland’s west coast, where he plans to live simply in a remote spot surrounded by the sea. A chance to think, to evaluate his old life. Society has changed, he believes, tolerance replaced by anger and hostility, mob justice. On Mull, his nearest neighbour, Maddy, says the island will enable him to put things into perspective. She’s right, and soon he discovers, “Time had become different, elongated somehow, the hours moving at a slower pace than they had done in his previous existence. Perhaps people lived longer here … an island life being drawn out by the simple fact of its insularity.” At some point, however, he must confront the unfinished business in his past – which may well involve another life-changing decision.

Alexander McCall Smith is an absolute master when it comes to handling big subjects like love, betrayal, injustice. This gorgeous book left me thinking we all need to be better, more tolerant – and that in tough times escaping to an out-of-the-way cottage on the Isle of Mull (or similar) is sometimes the best, the only, thing to do.

Visit Maria Malone's website.

--Marshal Zeringue